Pelicot Problem: how many men would rape you if they didn’t get caught?

How many men are prepared to rape a woman?

There’s a harrowing, silent question every woman in the world is asking herself today: which of the men I know would do that to me? If there is one thing the Pelicot case has blown out of the water, it’s the idea that only moustache-twirling sociopaths are rapists. No: the rapists are the guy in the supermarket. The guy at the bakery. The guy dating your cousin. The guy who fixed your bike.

In a tiny, rural French town, hundreds of men were prepared to rape a random woman who had done nothing to them: because they thought they could get away with it.

Could you predict who would do that to you?

Alarmingly, most of the rapists who were caught (there’s hundreds of hours of footage, but only about 50 have been identified and investigated) protested that they weren’t rapists: they were good guys. Normal guys. Dads, husbands, grandfathers, teachers, builders, cashiers. One even mourned that he knew what he’d done was wrong: because he’d cheated on his wife. Not because he’d had raped an unconscious drugged woman: but because he had cheated. Another described himself as a ‘victim’ because the case had ‘ruined his life’ and he’d been ‘tricked’ into raping her. To be reiterated, these aren’t sociopaths: just normal men. Men from a 10km radius. So how many…